She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 12

Ewan Trewin came down the lane at noon the next day with a brace of hares over his shoulder and his boots black to the knee, and stopped on the threshold when he saw the company.

“Your grace,” he said, and made a bow he had clearly been practising.

“Mr. Trewin,” Adrian said.

They had not met. Cecily understood that instantly, from the way they looked at each other — the duke on his feet in a fisherwoman’s kitchen, and the tall young man with a shotgun under his arm and blood on his hands, and between them a space where neither of them was willing to stand first.

Hannah took the hares. “Sit down, both of you. You’ll eat.”

So they ate, all four of them, at the small table, and it was the strangest meal of Cecily’s life — the husband she did not remember, sitting beside a woman who had known her for four years and never said so, and the nephew who had carried her off a road in the snow and had never once been paid a word of thanks for it.

Afterward, when the plates were cleared, Ewan reached into the inside pocket of his coat.

“Been meaning to give you this,” he said to Cecily. “Kept it because I didn’t know if it was the sort of thing a person ought to keep, and then I thought, well, she’s alive, it’s hers.”

He put it on the table.

A handkerchief. Fine white lawn, hemmed with a hand so fine it looked machine-made. In one corner, worked in pale silk, a single word.

Cecily.

She picked it up and saw her own work in it — the tiny even stitches, the fan of leaves she had done on the linen in her lap, the same pattern, the same small closed loops.

“That is my name,” she said.

“Aye.” Ewan nodded at the Duke. “She was holding that. And this.” He put down something else — no. He did not put anything else down. He turned to Cecily. “You were holding the cloth here in two fingers, like this.” He showed her. “Like it was the last thing you had. And the ring was on your hand already.”

Cecily looked down at the gold band.

“I was on the road alone,” she said.

“Aye.”

“At night.”

Ewan glanced at the Duke, and then away. “You come over the Ravensmoor top in weather. Road runs along the edge of the drop. My guess is the near horse spooked at something in the dark and went over the lip and took the carriage with it.” He turned his cap over in his hands. “Coachman was dead when I got there. Instant, if that helps. It should have been you as well, by rights.”

“How did you find me?”

“Wasn’t looking for you.” He said it plainly. “I was coming home. Saw a wheel spinning in the middle of the road at the bottom of the incline, which is a thing you don’t see, and then I saw the horses, and then I saw something white in the grass that shouldn’t have been there.”

“Grass,” Cecily said.

“You’d come out,” Ewan said. “Thrown clear. Landed in six inches of snow under the bank where nobody would’ve looked, and you were holding that cloth in your hand and you wouldn’t let it go. Aunt’s the one got it out of your fingers. Took her ten minutes.”

Hannah, at the fire, said nothing.

Cecily turned the handkerchief over. On the back, in the same careful hand, small and almost invisible against the hem — a date, three years old, and beneath it two letters:

C.A.

She looked up at Adrian Ashford, and for the first time saw him flinch.

“You know what this is,” she said.